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CURRENT ISSUE: FEBRUARY 20, 2015

Kids welcome. In celebration of national Take Your Child to Work Day, Human Resources will host activities for 8- to 12-year-olds from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on April 23. Children must be registered by April 17 and must be accompanied by an adult to attend. Space is limited. For more information, call x8300.

More than one in three U.S. adults is obese, a condition that puts them at risk for an alarming array of health problems, from diabetes and heart disease to cancer. But while obesity brings devastating consequences for many, some escape. For a select few, obesity causes little more than sore joints and fatigue, at least for a time.

The Rockefeller University Child and Family Center, long one of the university’s most coveted perks for parents and a model for work-site child care facilities nationwide, will expand by 40 percent this year, with five new classrooms to be constructed on the second floor of the Graduate Students Residence. The expansion, which will double the number of highly desirable infant spots available in the program as well as add new seats for toddlers and preschoolers, is the first increase in the CFC’s size since 2001 and will help shorten a lengthy admissions waitlist that some families remain on for two years or more.

Andrea Morris’s career in biology has had a few curves. After earning a Ph.D. in molecular biology and doing a postdoc, she took a tenure-track faculty job, teaching and running a lab at a small liberal arts college. But she ultimately gave up tenure, and the bench, to work in higher education administration. Now, as the newly hired director of career resources and professional development in Rockefeller’s Dean’s Office, she is charting yet another course, putting her biology Ph.D. to work in ways Rockefeller students and postdocs can appreciate.

The university’s Board of Trustees elected two new members in October 2014: Weslie Janeway, a philanthropist with a long-standing interest in genetics, and Michael J. Price, an investment advisor specializing in the telecom and technology industries. With their elections, the university now has 45 voting trustees.

Peter H. Sellers, among the earliest researchers on DNA and protein sequence comparison, died of cancer on November 15, 2014, at the age of 84. An obituary was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 25. Here, I offer a brief, personal perspective.

Richard M. Krause, a former Rockefeller University faculty member who later became director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and presciently warned against complacency toward infectious disease, has died at the age of 90.

The university’s annual holiday lecture for high school students, a tradition dating back to 1960, received a makeover this year. In addition to a new name, “Talking Science,” which debuted in 2013, the lecture was moved to the second Saturday of January, and expanded to include a lunchtime program of scientific demonstrations — highlights included electric fish, visual illusions and fruit fly mating — in the CRC, as well as the customary two-part lecture in Caspary Auditorium.

Mary Ellen Conley, the AAI-Steinman Award from the American Association of Immunologists. The award, named for the late Ralph M. Steinman, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology, recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to the understanding of immune processes underlying human disease pathogenesis, prevention or therapy. The award will be presented May 10 at the association’s annual meeting in New Orleans. Dr. Conley is a member of Jean-Laurent Casanova’s St. Giles Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases.